"You can't really put figures on this," one executive told The Register, "but we think we have 78 per cent of the libertarian news blogs, 91 per cent of the ClueTrain Manifesto fan sites, and 59 per cent of all blogging female arts graduates, many of whom are Virgos," he said.

"And the possibilities for vertical integration are endless," he enthused. "No cat will ever go ill again in America again in obscurity."

Located on a greenfield site more than an hour's drive from Dhaka, the Disney-style theme park sits a little incongruously alongside paddy fields and villages that have no running water or electricity.

The sponsors expect 5,000 visitors a day

On offer is everything the fun-lover would expect to find in a western theme park, right down to the hamburger bars, popcorn stalls and a large amusement arcade.

Critics argue the park itself is incongruous in a country where around half the population of 130m lives below the poverty line.

Paul sez: "You might want to point BoingBoingers
towards the ICANN blog, which is a nice, even-handed blog about all
things ICANN." ICANN is a big old mess and complicated as hell, but this is pretty fascinating stuff.
LinkDiscuss

That 300-most-common-words meme sure has legs. Paul Hoffman's using it to prove the failure of ICANN's new top-level domains.

The "common knowledge" is that the new TLDs (.biz, .info, and so on) have been pretty much of a failure for the TLD owners because the only people who have registered in them are trademark holders or domain name squatters. You almost never see any of the new TLDs being used on the net.

To test out this hypothesis, I wanted to see if they were being used for easy-to-find web sites. I took the list of the 300 most commonly-used words in English (found here) and searched for them on Google. I went ten pages deep on each search, grabbing every URL Google gave me. Of these 3000-odd URLs, exactly two of them used a new TLD: aaronland.info and www.nic.name. I assume that the latter came up on searching for the word "name", so it is almost not even countable.

Speaking of Worker and Parasite (the whacky Soviet cartoon from the Simpsons Gabbo episode), here's a little lo-res Quicktime clip of it, courtesy of the Internet Archive. I'd kill for a high-res still from this to make a t-shirt out of.
LinkDiscuss

I just got a shipment of fantastic doo-wop and swing rarities from Deaddog music, a microlabel bringing back old 78s and singles. My favorite? Steve Gibson and the Red Caps "You're Driving Me Crazy." I discovered Steve Gibson about eight years ago when his "Boogie Woogie on a Saturday Night" was briefly released (and quickly deleted). I have one other disk of his stuff, but most of his vast catalog of 78s is lost to history. The Deaddog disc has got some awesome stuff on it. I can't stop listening to the Boogie Woogie cover of "San Antonio Rose."
LinkDiscuss

She's a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed wreck and the idol of millions of young Russians.

Masyanya, an Internet cartoon based on the life of a hard-living, often unemployed, young woman wreaking havoc in St. Petersburg, is Russia's answer to both South Park and Dilbert.

I just watched a bunch of these, and while they're slightly more comprehensible than, say, the "Worker and Parasite" cartoons that Krusty the Clown put on after he lost Itchy and Scratchy to Gabbo, but they do lose something in the translation.
LinkDiscuss

The Shrub took money out of the budget for solar and renewable energy and used it to print the Department of Energy's budget (in which he announced that he was cutting the budget for etc etc etc). It's recursive evil.
LinkDiscuss
(Thanks, Pat!)

Some whacky netizen with access to an operating theatre and a fetishist's paradise of medical paraphenalia has documented his attempts to successfully separate conjoined Marshmallow Peep quintuplets. Pictured here is the doomed CPR attempt, made upon discovery that the newly separated Peep had no pulse.
LinkDiscuss
(Thanks, Pat!)

Here's a good debunking of the Herbalife MLM scam that is responsible for the choking of the world's streets with "WORK FROM HOME" signs on every possible surface. The author is really nonconfrontational in his language, patiently stepping through the impossibility of making money at MLMs, and talking in depth about the cost to society through the uglification of our commons with millions of shrill "ASK ME HOW" plastic signs.

They all had the SAME message. It was a woman's voice, and she started the message with a distinctive "Ya know". In the upcoming days of phone number investigation, I heard this message dozens of times. The next one was a wrong number, the sixth number was the "ya know" message. The seventh number had a different message, but it had some aspects of the first message, "20-year industry leader" and "tap into mail-order". This message, too, was an effort to send me a 14-page booklet.

Bruce Sterling's written a story using only the 300 most common words in the English language. It's a little short on eyeball kicks, but the rhythm's pretty tasty.

As many of you figured out, I had the wrong file pasted in. Below is the corrected text. Sorry. Busy day.

The of, and a to in, is you. That it? He for was on -- are as with
his they. At be this: "From I have, or by one had not; but what all
were." When we there can: an your which!
Their said, "If do will each about, how up out them?" Then she
many -- some -- so these would other into. Has more; her two, like him.
See, time could no make than first.

Here's a Google page with a list of all the different spellings people have used to search for Britney Spears. (And this list doesn't even include all the variations on "spears," either!) Some are obviously typos, but plenty are just shots in the dark at getting her name right. LinkDiscuss

If the terrorists don't get you, cosmic rays will. Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

Though not widely known, in-flight radiation is becoming a growing concern
among researchers, crew members and the fliers who have to log thousands of
miles a month. On any flight, radiation from stars penetrates the airplane,
and experts say repeated exposure may be a health risk, similar to getting
too many X-rays. The issue has not only led to changes at some foreign
airlines, but prompted the FAA to set up a new radiation Web site. And next year, the
U.S. government plans to release findings on the long-term effects on crew
members, covering everything from miscarriages to cancer.

NASA is planning a mission to Mecury in 2004. The unmanned orbiting satellite will take pictures of the planet and collect information on the planet's composition and atmosphere. Interestingly, Mercury is the only planet besides Earth with a magnetic field. (Makes you wonder how John Carter made his way around Barsoom.) LinkDiscuss

Chinese soldiers are barred from carrying mobile phones and pagers, to protect military secrets. The article implies that the ban extends to off-duty soldiers, too. Are landlines so unheard-of in China that you can stop long-distance communication by banning mobiles?
LinkDiscuss

A new kind of service dog can predict epileptic seizures through subtle changes in their owners' behavior -- now, if we can only get fast-food franchisees to stop kicking them out of their restaurants.
LinkDiscuss

Every six or eight months, the NYT dredges up some netphobe to tell us all that The Web is Boring. Derek takes exception to the assertion, and is inviting people to suggest non-boring things online.

Now is a great time for the web! I've seen more interesting projects turn up in the last year than I can count, and I feel like we're just getting started. Weblogs, community sites, real world experiments. RSS, XML, web services. And more and more.

qi-gong psychotic reaction: (China) an acute, time-limited episode characterized by dissociative, paranoid, or other psychotic or nonpsychotic symptoms that occur after participating in the Chinese folk health-enhancing practice of qi-gong.

koro: (Malaysia) an episode of sudden and intense anxiety that the penis (or in the rare female cases, the vulva and nipples) will recede into the body and possibly cause death.

spell: (southern U.S.) a trance state in which individuals "communicate" with deceased relatives or with spirits.

A University lecturer smashed one of the plastinated corpse exhibits at the Atlantis Gallery in London with a hammer. Everybody's a critic.

Mr Lee, from Islington, North London, has been charged with criminal damage and will appear at Thames Magistrates' Court next month. He believes that a jury will agree with his view that you cannot commit criminal damage on a dead body. He said yesterday: "I decided I would walk into the exhibition with a hammer and smash up the most expensive exhibit to make the point that you cannot turn bodies into commercial exhibits."

He launched the attack after seeing the young girl being taken around the gallery. "I was enraged that he (Professor von Hagen) was capable of inflicting that horrific exhibition on an innocent child. I smashed up one of them to smithereens. It's not easy to hit a hammer through a dead body and it took some doing."

Crossover lets you install and run MSFT Office on an Intel/AMD Linux box without an emulator. Office for Linux! Looks like there're still some bugs and performance issues, but with any luck they'll sort 'em out.

Installation of all Office programs under CrossOver was point-and-click easy. After installation, all of the basic functions of each Office program worked well. Only features that involved graphics, such as adding clip art to Word documents or animations to PowerPoint files, were somewhat unstable.

Office programs loaded and operated quickly under CrossOver, but slowed, sometimes to a crawl, when more than two applications or several windows in one application were open at once.

Outlook was the most difficult program to set up, and it occasionally froze during long e-mail transfers. Internet Explorer performed perfectly, as did Windows Media Player 7, although sound in the player was muffled even at the highest volume settings.

"Los Angeles-based PR agency seeking journalist/writer to work exclusively on the account of a not-for-profit, somewhat controversial not-for-profit association. The client is a spiritual growth/personal development -type movement. The opposition is made of disgruntled members/apostates and is very active on hate sites on the internet." Scientology, I presume?
LinkDiscuss (Thanks, John!)

Acclaim Entertainment has announced that advertisements for its game Shadow Man: 2econd Coming for the PlayStation 2 are set to appear on gravestones across the UK as part of the first advertising campaign to use memorial plaques as part of a marketing strategy. The company is inviting relatives of the recently deceased to contact them if they are interested in subsidizing the costs associated with death in return for a small advertisement promoting the game with lead character Mike LeRoi's head and the logo as seen in the photo attached to this story.

Shaun White, communications manager at Acclaim said, "The concept of what we're calling 'deadvertising' is entirely consistent with the theme of the Shadow Man: 2econd Coming game and provides us with a permanent presence for our advertising. Content and context are two important principles of marketing Shadow Man."